Random Observations: Part 3

So Avril Lavigne still seems to be pretty popular around here. I thought teenagers were kind of over her in America, but she seems to be making some rupees over here in Nepal (which actually makes me kind of mad because she doesn't need their money!). People are still talking about Titanic too---still!---I distinctly remember seeing that movie in December 1997.

Nepalis seem to like clearing their throats. . . A LOT! They spit everywhere too. I don't think it's considered anykind of social faux pas to just hawk up a big hairball and unload in public, in the street, even on the patio at home. Sometimes I wake up to the most horrible sound, like someone is choking, gagging, trying to get something really horrible out of their system for like half an hour! and then I open my door and it's been the little 11-year old girl spitting (and spitting) all along.

Morning Running

Yesterday, the oldest daughter Manisha, her cousin and I went "running" (it was really more light jogging and mostly a walk) at 4:30 in the morning. When she asked me the night before if I wanted to go, I was ecstatic---I was under the impression that people just didn't exercise or go for a run here. First of all, there's no room. Second of all, you can't breathe. This is really true for the city at least. Another huge concern for me is that I'm a Westerner and really I can't do anything anywhere at anytime of the day without everyone staring. That will be so nice to come home to anonymity. Add me running down the street in Kathmandu to the equation and people I really think would be beside themselves. There's also no way that I would be able to run down the street in shorts either. The list kind of goes on and on why it would definitely not be wise for me to go for a run in Nepal.

Luckily I wear long shorts to begin with, but I really have tried to limit how much I even wear those. Shoulders and cleavage are pretty taboo, but strangely enough, it is appropriate for a woman in traditional Nepali dress (with the draped flowing material scarves, etc. . . think India) to show her stomach and back.

However, going running with a native who actually brought up the idea. . . that's a whole other story. I have despised morning running and exercise of all kinds for as long as I can remember and I was thrilled to go! Nepali peoples' routine really parallels that of the sun: when the sun is up, they're up, and they really don't stay up too late either. I'm falling into the same routine. I'm totally exhausted if it's like 10 pm and I can wake up easily at 4:30, 5 or 6 without an alarm clock and I feel really good. This whole Nepal experience is going to revolutionize my life, tell you what.

The air was clean and refreshing, but even more refreshing was the lack of people and animals, and of those people who were out, many of them were exercising and running too! I'm laughing right now at how surprised I was. It was really nice to see groups of women out together and doing something other working. The women work SO hard here. I look at the mom of my host family and she's just such a good mom: she really loves her kids and helps them with their homework, she cooks for them, she works in the garden and in the fields, she works in the shop, she washes the clothes.

Nepal is a VERY male dominated society (and I actually have some pretty surprising things to write about that later) and so when one "goes out," like down the street to do errands, you're bombarded with men everywhere and it can be so nervewracking and sometimes downright scary. I remember that this was one of the very first impressions I got when I arrived at the airport in Kathmandu and was trying to stay calm (with a Coke naturally) when my bags didn't arrive with me and I had to wait around the airport by myself for about an hour because my ride forgot to pick me up. (True story, and I did eventually get my bags even though I really thought they were gone forever when I looked around that tiny backwards airport.) There were absolutely no women around---just men everywhere hanging around talking and smoking cigarettes.

Probably the highlight of the morning outing, though, was that the sky was finally clear enough of clouds for me to see a silhouette of the Himalayas on the skyline. It completely took my breath away. Because it is the monsoon season, the sky is usually some shade of purple or gray and it totally obscures any hope of seeing the amazing mountains. The mountains rise SO high into the skyline. . . I think that it's so crazy that I should be so impressed, especially since I'm no stranger to mountains living in Utah. That's how spectacular they are. (I was very lucky too right before I arrived at my project, I had the opportunity to catch a glimpse of some mountains from a little retreat some friends and I took up to the hills.) We were so lucky, because even within 20 minutes of seeing the horizon with the sunrise, it was totally gone and you couldn't see anything.

We walked for awhile and it was about 5:30 and the sun was up and so were most people, a lot of them already milling around on the streets, busy to get to work or already working. I couldn't believe that already so early all these little mom and pop type shops were open and ready to go. I went back home and went to sleep for 2 and a half more hours.

Respect and School

It's a little unnerving sometimes how respectful the students are at school. When a teacher, or really any kind of authority figure enters the room, they all arise without hesitation and they greet whoever it is with a chorus of good morning or good afternoon. If a teacher is already in the class---it doesn't matter whether the teacher is already teaching or not---they ask for permission to enter before they set a foot inside the room. The students know my name is "Camila" but always address me as "m'am" or "miss." All males are "sir" as well. Students don't slouch (they can't really, they're sitting on benches---there's really, much to my dismay, a deplorable lack of good comfy couches, beds, chairs and soft pillows in this country!) and they don't ask to get excused from class ever. No one gets "checked" out from school. (!) If students miss class, I've found it's been because they've been working in the rice fields. Even our principal wasn't there yesterday because he was doing the same thing. When students are called on or volunteer an answer, they stand and answer and only sit when the teacher allows them to (sometimes this is the thing I forget. . . I move on to something else and this poor child is still standing because I didn't excuse them.) When the class is over, the teacher leaves the room and the children all stand up and say "Thank you" in unison.

At the beginning of the day, the students from nursery on up to about class 8, join together in the dirt courtyard that separates the primary grade and secondary grade buildings . The buildings are almost open air, with cement floors. They do not have electricity nor even glass windows. Of course there is not air-conditioning nor plumbing as we know it. The secondary building where I do almost all of my work is not even finished. The first floor has 4 small functional classrooms and then there's a cement staircase leading up to a very unfinished second floor/doubling as roof. We go up there and sit on benches just to feel the cool breeze and to look at the rice paddies below. I cannot believe that no child has fallen off the top because it's just a straight drop!

Like I was saying, at 10 in the morning most of the 300-number student body line up in perfect lines and they practice their "attention" and "at ease." They do some stretches too. So cute. All of this is happening in Nepali so I really don't know everything that's going on, but I know that the PE teacher at my school (who is totally into this whole militaristic type of thing) would be drooling if he could see little 3-year olds in school uniform doing stretches in unison.

They also sing the Nepali national anthem every morning! The students seem to love to sing---the people as whole, actually seem to love to sing---but they are not so hot on keeping a tune. I thought I might have the chance to teach some music while I was here, but right now, the immediate need is for me to teach English (there isn't a piano here either which doesn't completely rule out teaching music; it would just be a little harder). They don't have arts or sports classes or electives; everything is pretty no frills utilitarian. And yet the kids are happy and they never complain. They are always telling me how they like this teacher, or they think that teacher is funny. They go to school through most of the summer, and students from class 8 and up go to school 7 in the morning and stay until 5, sometimes 6 in the evening, and still they do not complain.

Right now I am teaching English conversation classes for classes 8, 9 and 10, and I am teaching an English grammar class for class 7. I think that they are also adding an additional English grammar class for either class 5 or 6 to my schedule because there are some there are some teachers out on training. I am happy to be busy because I had so much free time when I first arrived at the project. I am having to create the curriculum for the English conversation classes and that has already been challenging; I would be scared to death if I hadn't taught English class on my mission (especially) or if I weren't already a teacher. It is also difficult to plan because the English speaking skills vary so much from one student to the next. For the advanced grades, most of their courses are even taught in English. I saw their their written exams and their English was beautiful! But some can speak a fair amount, and many cannot really at all. English is used a lot in Nepal in general---but always with a LOT of holes and grammatical mistakes in it (you would die seeing some of the signs in print or things on television; you would think that there would be someone in the country to proofread!)---so it's also hard to gauge what they really know and what they're faking, etc. For the other classes, there are no extra books so I am basically winging it the whole time, as I show up to class and borrow books from the children as we go along. Again, if I didn't practice this teaching thing everyday anyway, I would be drowning!

Despite still being somewhat speechless about the whole respect thing, I still much prefer teaching my kidlets in America. For anyone worried that I won't come back, thinking that I've found my teaching paradise here in Nepal, well, you definitely don't need to worry about that.

Field Trip!

(actually written a day previously) I am having major internet angst today. It all started yesterday (when it got so bad that I had to email my friends and give them my passwords to get my credit card bill paid because I couldn't get it done here). Today, however, it took me a solid 30 minutes to be able to send a simple email. Frustration! To prove my dedication to the blog which, after 45 minutes has refused to open completely, I am writing this entry on an email that I will later cut and paste. I almost half wonder if the internet places around here make the internet service slow on purpose so you have to sit on the computers longer, thus having to pay more money. Luckily, everything here basically costs me pennies compared to what it would in the US, so at least I'm not annoyed about the financial burden of staring at the little green squares forever updating at the bottom of my computer screen.

The students have school six days a week, from Sunday to Friday, with Friday as a half day and Saturday as the national holiday (our equivalent of Sunday). The sad part about Saturday is that it really feels no different from any other day here. Everything is still open and runs on the same schedule, and no one really abstains from any specific activities because it's a "holy day." (Usually I can't tell if their telling me it it's a holy day (sacred) or holiday (vacation or bacation---they switch their b's and v's around all the time just like in Spanish; saying their f's like p's is another big one). One thing I do credit Hindus for though, is the fact that religion doesn't seem to be something that they set aside for one day a week. They stop by their temples and shrines everyday---they're just about as commonplace as our Mormon churches in Utah---where they mark themselves with the tika (the red marks on their foreheads, I'm still trying to figure out what it all symbolizes) and walk around their statues and pray to their relics. Just for your information, 0.15% of the population here (about 26 million) is Christian. There is essentially no mention of Jesus Christ here in any kind of discussion. People know of Him and it's not even that I feel like it is frowned upon, but I think it doesn't even enter anyone's consciousness as being relevant. I think this fact alone might be the reason why I continue to struggle with my feelings of isolation and loneliness---because I am truly alone out here.

Well this past holiday/holy day of Saturday, I had 9 EXTREMELY eager and giddy 6th/7th grade girls escort me on a fieldtrip of some of the local sites. They asked me to go with them the first day I came to the school---Tuesday---and I think I was reminded no less than 20 times a day that they were going to come to my house to pick me up at 10 in the morning. The main place we were going was called Naghada, a local pond. It is a very serene and beautiful place, with a lot of local religious superstition surrounding it (I guess a lot of people routinely die there.). We walked around admiring the flowers (throughout the course of the day I received 3 handfuls full of flowers from the girls---flowers that most of us can only find at the florist (or Costco, ha ha) and the lily pads and lotus flowers.

Then the girls pointed to a hill a fair distance away and said that that there was a Hindu temple that we could hike up to. I was totally game, but was skeptical looking at the girls that we had assembled at the pond. (Imagine a group of young young teenage girls who speak only very broken English taking you up to hike the "Y" with no water, wearing sandals, etc.) It had only been about a 20 minute walk to the pond and some of them looked pretty feeble already. Knowing full well that I'd want to poke my own eyes out in a few hours, we set out to tackle the temple Santaneashor.

We walked through the beautiful countyside---I am fascinated with the terraced rice fields and paddies on the hills. I see it everyday from the house where I live and I still can't be anything but in awe of it. Everything is so green and wet. Including the dirt road. I was only wearing flip-flops and so I was basically sliding through the mud. I probably would have had better traction going barefoot. It was so humid and the girls had the luxury of being able to drink irrigation water or random water from a random hose. . . I can't even brush my teeth with tap water, so I can't even imagine how sick I would get if I drank that. They kept pushing it on me but it was basically lost in translation why I couldn't drink it. Eventually, we reached a drier area, but it was mostly uphill. We hiked through little village settlements and watched people bathe from wells (well, not WATCH,watch, but you know what I mean. . .) The sky was looking very ominous and I was worried about rain, especially considering the already existing state of the paths and roads we were taking. And of course, the girls wanted to sit and rest every 5 minutes.

We finally reached the 5 million, I mean, 357 steps ("ladders" as the girls kept calling them) for the final ascent to the temple. Again, it was much of the same thing---some of the girls were racing up tothe top and climbing trees and hanging off the edge, and others way down at the bottom, hanging onto each other and looking like death. I think I was somewhere in the middle, being the "mom" (being a teacher has killed whatever fun I used to be able to have and now my maternal instincts have kicked in and I need to make sure no one is talking to strangers or getting run over) and trying to keep track of everyone despite the major language barrier and my all terrain flip flops.

FINALLY we all got up the top. I thought it would never happen. The breeze was SO cool and refreshing, and the view was pretty spectacular. One amazing thing about Nepal is that you can be in the tropics one moment, and then the next second, you're walking through a high altitude forest with pine trees. Then we came down the hill from the other side. We saw some boys from our school and you should have seen these girls: they literally shrank into nothingness and could barely acknowledge a hello as they passed. So funny. (Give them 6 months and that will all change.) On the way down, I actually misjudged a step and fell down right on my wrist (and man to I have a nasty bruise there!), breaking my watch that I had gotten a week earlier in Kathmandu. I was really okay, (I think thanks to my watch) but these little girls were so scared that I was angry with them because they had allowed me to fall. Of course I wasn't, but they were probably subconsciously picking up on the fact that I was a little worried that it was already drizzling and we had a long walk back in the mud.

We made it back home, again at a teenage girls' snail's pace---I'm learning to relax though (because I obviously didn't learn the lesson when I lived in Italy), nothing is very hurried here in Nepal; simple pleasures, like a beautiful walk, are to be savored and enjoyed---and without major incident or weather emergencies of bibical proportion. That happened about 2 hours after I got home and it poured for like 12 hours straight. Despite my joking, it was so fun to be escorted around by a very attentive, well-intentioned and sweet group of students. I don't know how many students in America would necessarily do that.

A low-key group of very nice girls from the older classes, 9-10, approached me today and asked me if I wanted to go to see some of the famous temples and pagodas (did you know that the pagoda style of architecture you see in buildings all over Asia was actually exported from Nepal centuries ago?) in the nearby city of Patan on Friday. I am already excited at the prospect of less drama, and am relieved to know that it won't take me 2 days to recover afterward.

Just because. . .

Just because everything has to be more difficult in this country than it really needs to be, of course my USB drive is not wanting to connect to this computer, and so I haven't been able to upload any of my sweet pictures yet. I am determined to make it work soon.

Random Observation 2

In a world that has been taken over by the McDonald's corporation, you might be pleased to know that there is still one last section of frontier that Ronald has not found. Yes, my friends, there is no McDonald's in Kathmandu. I would wager a guess that this is the largest metropolitan area in the world to not have one. And while this is a VERY good thing, it's also a shame too, because McDonald's abroad tastes so good.

My Host Family and Other Tangents

So my host family is pretty much the coolest. The dad is some kind of local hero in this neighborhood (I think he just does a lot of good things for this community.) He is a pharmacist in Kathmandu and so I get the feeling that his family is pretty comfortable, even though they don't have a car, and in the house there is no flush toilet, there is no real enclosed bathroom, I take cold showers in another little closet (and I'm actually getting used to it), and there is no refrigerator.

But there is a TV. And I have to say that Mexican TV is no match in cheesiness to Nepali and Hindi TV. Everything is about 15 times more dramatic than it really needs to be. The acting is very, very bad. It is funny to me now, but I think in a few weeks I will think it is not so funny. Alright, so back to the family: the father's English is pretty broken but he always talks to me and you can tell that he's such a joker. He is not a big man, except he has this jolly pop belly exactly like Santa Claus, and he's always wearing this tank top that's about 2 sizes too small.

In Nepal, if someone says that you're fat, it's actually a compliment. I think it is a type of status symbol, like you are well enough off financially that you can eat well. Most everyone is very skinny. Another unusual indication of social status here too is a long pinky fingernail. We volunteers first noticed that our program coodinator had one very long pinky nail and were hoping that he wasn't on drugs or something; I know that that's the first thing that comes to my mind when I see that in the States. However, what it actually means is that you don't a manual labor type job and you're priviledged enough that you don't have to work with your hands (like in the fields) and thus you can grow your pink nail really long. I'm not really a fan.

Speaking of fields, my host family has a rice field across the street from the house where they live. We are close to Kathmandu, but far enough removed so that it is cleaner and more peaceful, with addition of rice fields intermingled with the buildings. My family owns the entire building where they live, with a little shop---a 7-11 on a very reduced scale---on the first floor, rooms to let on the second, and then we live on the third floor. We eat all of our meals from the open air patio (there is not really a dining room) and even from there, the view of the hills is fabulous.

I had no idea that Nepal would feel so tropical. Supposedly, I am here in Nepal at the worst time possible. May through August is the monsoon season and so it rains and rains, and when it's not pouring the view of highest mountains in the world is impeded by clouds (I did happen to happen to catch a glimpse of a couple a few days ago when I was up in the hills though, and it rocked my world. We were already at 7200 feet elevation and these mountains towered over us. There are no words!). It is also the most dangerous time to go trekking because of the rains, and mudslides and leeches, so even though I looked into that, I decided that I wasn't into sliding down a mountain and setting blood-sucking leeches on fire while still attached to my leg. I DO have my limits.

We can also easily go the the roof of the building and the view is even more spectacular. We go up there when there's a power outage (which is often; Kathmandu has rolling power outages because there is simply not enough power to go around. They simply turn off power to neighborhoods for a couple hours and then they turn it back on and cut the lights for someone else.) We also go up there to watch flights take off and land from the airport---it's like our own little "Inspiration Point." The airplanes start to come in as little dots from the clouds, and before you know it they practically fly right by us and then we can see the ONE runway of Kathmandu airport lit up to guide them in.

I have my own room in the house and it has been a relief and a half to have some privacy (of which there was none when I was at the hostel with the other volunteers in Kathmandu. As an endowed member of the Church it was causing me a great deal of stress. I also have a very nice bed. Okay, it's pretty much hard, but much more forgiving than the planks covered with blankets that we had at the hostel. The pillows are so hard here too! What is up?

The mother doesn't like to let on that she speaks English, but I think that she is just embarrassed because I can tell that she understands so much. There are 3 children: 15-year old Manisha, 11-year old Anisha, and almost 8-year old Anish. Just in case you can't tell, the two oldest are girls and then the youngest is a boy. He is my little monkey. I LOVE playing with him. His English is pretty rudimentary, but we still manage to have so much fun. The two girls are pretty good with their English and they are my salvation, especially Manisha! She is zany and funny and is the one who explains most everything to me. Anisha gives me some pretty intense dance lessons on the roof and teaches me how to cook. She is at that age where she is taking offense to everything and because it is hilarious, Manisha and Anish tag-team her and purposely try to antagonize her. It is sad and funny at the same time. I have seen Anish pull off a couple dramatic tantrums as well---he is still really such a little boy. Hanging out with the family is so fun and they are SO incredibly good to me. It is nice to live with a family with little kids again. Just like how I had mentioned that the personalities of the students in their grades completely translated from country to country in another entry, it is the same with the family. The dynamics are just the same and that is a great source of comfort to me in a country where everything is so markedly different from that which I know.